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Showing posts with label Empathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Empathy. Show all posts

Monday, February 14, 2022

Blogging Tips for Beginner Bloggers

A lone blogger working on a computer with a notepad and pen, a smartphone and a mug of coffee on a brown table top
Most digital marketers always want to get into blogging but not many really blog right. Some do right but quickly hit a block, get confused and don’t really know what to do next. Many zealously get into the highly competitive world of blog writing only to realize that they are not quite making a success out of it as they would have wished. Some do get some bits of traffic inflow which may be disappointing to them. Many of such bloggers are perpetually struggling to get more traffic. If you are in this category of bloggers or you are just starting out on a long journey of blogging, pay attention to these here tips. Expert bloggers do not hesitate to recommend many of these tips which have one way or another helped them out in their very eventful blogging experiences. These tips have helped me tremendously too.



Write What You’re Passionate About

When you are starting out as a blogger, it is in your best interest to write something you know well and enjoy and are passionate about. That saves you the drudgery of writing on what you do not have sufficient information about that others will like to read. Writing about what you know will help you to easily give out quality info that will attract and sustain your blog readers’ attention. Doing so consistently translates to good traffic. Good blogs content must be uniquely written from your passion. Bland and uninteresting topics and subject matters are not helpful to quality blog content.

If you aim to promote products you love and make money on the side, you can embed a few links to these products in your blog content. Anytime a reader clicks on these links and buys a product, you earn a commission from the sale.

Write Purposefully

Write only what will interest your readers. You must always write with a clear purpose that will not be boring to your readers. That is about the only credible way to keep them interested in your content and to anticipate more. Avoid writing randomly about whatever you fancy or whatsoever comes to your mind. That is not very helpful to your readers and may even confuse them. If you write on purpose, you will not only educate your readers, you will entertain them as well. Problem solving for your readers should always be paramount in your mind. That helps to shape your content. If for instance you blog in the “make money online” niche like most professional bloggers, then the purpose of your blog should be clearly to help people make money legitimately online and to avoid scams and get-rich-quick schemes that abound on the internet.

Write Naturally and Simply

If you write what your readers do not understand, not writing at all is better. Write naturally and simply for everyone to understand no matter their level of education. Avoid grammatical complications and jaw-breaking words. Write conversationally as if you are having a one-on-one conversation with your reader. This is because most people welcome and enjoy conversational speak particularly when it is intent on helping to provide them with valuable information. Good blog content should not be presented like a college thesis, business report, or some complex legal document. The technicalities that characterize such reports are always a put off for most blog readers. Therefore, you must blog to entertain and to inform in a very simple style of presentation just as you are reading here.



Always Proofread Your Work

If you are a beginner blogger, do not unduly worry if your grammar is not perfect from the outset. Start writing and keep on writing to improve your grammar. If you aim to be a good and credible writer, proofreading your work is a must. Depending on the speed of your writing and your thought process, it is inevitable that your first draft in any written document will have errors. Such errors include improper punctuation, spelling errors, a lack of proper paragraphs, bad formatting, and improper words spacing. These are put offs for most blog readers. Proofreading your work thoroughly helps to clear most of such errors. It shows professionalism too. The more you write, the better you become as a writer. It is best to read and re-read your content thoroughly before publishing. That way, you can spot most of the errors and correct them adequately. In addition, you can use online tools to aid your proofreading process. These tools may not be 100% perfect but they are quite helpful and handy to use. Many expert bloggers do recommend Grammarly and ProWritingAid tools for proofreading. I do use such tools too but they have a few tolerable drawbacks even though they can help spot a handful of errors you never even thought your content had.

Be Consistent and Stick with Your Theme

If you want to succeed fast as a blogger, make sure you are consistent. Consistency helps to build trust and credibility for your content fast enough. By consistently sticking to your central theme and avoiding diversions, you build trust easily because your audience likes it. That is one of the best ways to grow your audience as a blogger. Starting with one theme and diverting into another is not professional. It manages to kill the interest of your blog readers. You must strive to give your original readers what they want at all times without diverting to something different. Writing about too many different things at a time could result in you losing track of your blog’s subject/theme. You lose the interest of readers as well. If you want to write about making money online for instance, stick with that. Anyone who is interested in making money online will stick to your content. That helps to grow your audience.
 
Have a Blogging Schedule/Calendar

Scheduling your content not only helps to boost your productivity, it also helps to release your content timorously. Your content writing schedule/Calendar could be set on twice a day, daily, or even weekly, during which time you shut off all distractions like phones and TVs to concentrate on writing. If your blog is designed and specially targeted, you can also time the release of your blog content depending on the audience you are targeting around the time zones of the world. That helps the effectiveness of your content. Blogging is hugely tasking no doubt. So, having a schedule/calendar can help to organize things a lot better and make your blogging easier and more effective. Through these efforts, chances are, your blog writing will start to come more naturally and effortlessly once habits begin to build even if you are a beginner.

Worry Less about Traffic Early on

Most new blogs usually go unnoticed for some period of time. This could extend to several weeks or months without any tangible traffic. There is no cause to worry. Do not let lack of traffic discourage you at the beginning. Avoid the discouraging feeling that you are writing for nobody and wasting your time. Just keep writing and publishing. It takes quite a while for search engines to find and rank your content. Brand new domains are always viewed with caution by major search engines like Google. That is why you need real patience to give search engines time to start trusting your content. In addition, populating your blog across social media platforms also takes quite a while before your content starts trending with enthusiastic audience. All you need is patience. Keep writing and the traffic will come in due time.

Brainstorm Regularly

Take it from me, everyone including yours truly struggles to come up with good ideas to write blog content. The antidote to that is to form the habit of brainstorming regularly. Doing so helps you to be more and better productive in your blogging. If you are brainstorming particularly in a very quiet corner of your home, have a pen and notepad handy to jot down any ideas floating around your mind. If you don’t get distracted, brainstorming can help to get your creative juices flowing unlimited. That way, you could come up with some credible new content ideas within an hour or two. If you go to work immediately after that, you may be able to knock out a few good blog posts from such ideas.



Avoid Becoming Overwhelmed

Focus and deep focus is recommended for beginner bloggers. It is best to focus on just one blog and theme when starting out. As most experienced bloggers very well know, writing about too many things can quickly become overwhelming. That scenario inevitably leads to poor productivity. If as a beginner blogger you out of excitement and enthusiasm decide to start several blogs related to many different themes/niches, you’ll quickly begin to fail once you realize how much work is involved to keep your many blogs online. Many new bloggers usually give up and quit at this point when they realize that updating and posting on too many blogs at a time takes quite a lot of work and time. The only viable solution to avoid being overwhelmed is to concentrate on one blog at a time and master it well. That helps to save valuable time and efforts and to have enough concentration to really improve on and master your blogging activities.

Write with Empathy

Yes indeed! As a blogger, you must realize early on that you are writing for others to read. So, you must put yourself in your readers’ shoes when writing your blog posts. You need to empathize with your readers while attempting to help solve their problems. You can win the trust of your readers faster if they perceive how empathetic you are in your content. That way, they’ll relate better with you as well. You can for instance think about how to help bald men. You can put yourself in the reader’s shoes by explaining a story related to how you handled your own balding problems. That way, you can better help your reader find that very cure you have used in treating your own baldness. By doing this, you are clearly letting it on to your reader that you are human trying to reach out and help another human and not just another fast talking salesman attempting to make a quick sale.

Maintain a List of Future Ideas

This is why as a beginner blogger, it is advisable to always have a pen and notepad with you anywhere you find yourself. As you walk around and network with people all day, any ideas that come up should be jotted down for future use. Experience shows that maintaining a list of future blog posts and ideas is imperative to your content creation strategy and resourcefulness. Sometimes, a random idea could pop into your head at a random time of day and anywhere. If you don’t jot it down for future use, you may forget about it. These notes can be of tremendously help to you when figuring out what to write. They could save you time too. That’s quality time that would have been spent trying to remember or figure out an idea/topic to write about. These days, nearly everyone carries around a smartphone. If the idea of carrying around a pen and notepad is not cool with you, you can install an app on your phone that will sync with your computer. That comes in very handy to jot down ideas when you are away from your computer.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

6 Smart Ways to Make Unhappy Customers Happy



Doodling with a red pencil.

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” - Jim Rohn

Smart business owners are coming to terms with the fact that happy customers are good for business. How to keep customers happy has therefore become a common concern for many business owners. If as it happens often a customer isn’t happy, it is smart to use some tried-and-tested strategies to turn things around. Here are some of the strategies some top entrepreneurs routinely use to handle unhappy customers.

01. Take full responsibility for mistakes. When any of your customers gets agitated about your product or service, do not make the mistake of shifting blames. Take full responsibility and get to work on the issue immediately. Be sure to personally communicate with the concerned customer. Never make the mistake of delegating this duty. When customers realize they are dealing with the “real man” behind the business, it gives them real assurances and that makes them happy.



02. Give your customers a listening ear. Be available always for your customers no matter how busy you are. Many times, customers are unhappy because no one actually listens to their complaints. That is very true! As a business owner, when such disputes arise, you can listen directly and resolve them yourself. A direct telephone conversation with the complaining customer comes very handy here. That goes a long way to douse tension and calm frayed nerves most of the time.

03. Habitually engage your customers. Doing this shows that you value your customers and their concerns. You can directly engage your customers through feedback throughout the buying process or by asking for their preferences even during product development. It is generally true that the more businesses engage with customers, the happier they are.

04. Show empathy and never forget to say sorry. Sorry is a very powerful and highly emotional word to use in business. Never forget to connect to your customers’ emotional levels as a way of reminding them you're only human and are trying everything possible to make them happy. Show genuine empathy with their concerns and be as transparent as possible to make them understand you are doing everything to have the issue of their concern resolved very quickly. That somehow manages to make them happy to allow you resolve the matter.

05. Respond fast to customer concerns. Quick response is always a very vital key in any dispute resolution. In resolving customer disputes, speed could be more essential that even the solution. Without speed, many customers probably won’t even give you the opportunity to find a solution. They could be that impatient.

06. Resolve customer concerns without delay. Always remember that no matter what business you are in, you always have real competitors out there snapping at your heels to take away your customers. Quick fixing of problems could be their selling points to achieve their goals. So, to keep your own customers happy and loyal to you, you must find practical and credible ways to quickly resolve customer concerns. Customers are always happy when they have the full assurances that your business can deliver quick solutions to their problems.

Monday, May 22, 2017

Making Customers Happy by Creating a Raving Fan Culture

A team of skipping happy customers.

Image Credit: gstatic.com

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” - Jim Rohn

Every business is all about making customers happy and satisfied. Any entrepreneur who is able to do this consistently inevitably becomes a successful entrepreneur. In human relations, nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. These days, thanks to Bruce Temkin, some businesses have been able to create a “raving fan” customer culture through the acronym “C-A-R-E-S”. Here is how it can be applied to make unhappy customers happy. Note carefully that each step is very important to the process. Whenever any of your customers shows any signs of unhappiness through a feedback question/reaction, you know it is time to switch to your CARES mode of:

(C), Communication: Clearly communicate the process up front and set proper expectations.

(A), Accountability: Take responsibility for resolving the situation or getting an answer in a satisfactory manner.

(R), Responsiveness: Take initiative; don’t make the customer wait for your communication or a solution.

(E), Empathy: Acknowledge the impact that the situation has on the customer.

(S), Solution: Be results oriented; ensure the question is properly answered and the issue is resolved.

If you manage to build a company that truly CARES about its customers using above steps, you somehow earn their eternal happiness. The happiness of your customers translates to good business for you. Happy customers are happy partners for good business. This you can achieve by caring for them and making “raving fans” out of them in the months and years ahead.